Steve Bannon: Broligarchs vs populists

Hvordan ser den nye høyresiden i USA ut? Er det dukket opp en ny fløy rundt Donald Trump bestående av investorer og toppleder som har blitt milliardærer på grunn av suksessen til USAs teknologiselskaper? 

New York Times kommnentator Ross Douthat har en lang og interessant podcast med Steve Bannon som gjest og går igjennom amerikansk høyresides nyere historie som en populistisk opposisjon til det republikanskje partiet, og hvordan Donald Trump ble fanebærer for denne nye populistiske høyresiden. 

I følge Bannon finnes det ingen tech-milliardærfløy på høyresiden, bare noen rike folk som av taktiske grunn har blitt Trump-tilhengere i forbindelse med valget, men i bunn og brunn er opportunistiske oligarker. Noen høydepunkter:

"Bannon: And most important, the capitalists are always trying to drive down wages. Now they do it two ways. They either allow illegal immigration at the border, which drives down wages of lower-skilled workers, particularly African American and Hispanic. But they also scammed the system with a whole set of visa programs, and they call it kind of fancy names — the H-1B visas.

All they’re trying to do is bring in indentured servants into the country at a third less or 50 percent less and are very compliant about what they have to do, to make sure they don’t have to pay American graduates. And this is why Silicon Valley is an apartheid state. It’s the reason you have no Hispanics or Blacks. There’s no shot to get into Silicon Valley. It’s not because Americans are dumber. It’s not because Americans are lazy. It’s because American citizens are — you have a globalist system."

Bannon går enda lengre i sine angrep på de som driver de store teknologiplattformene:

"Bannon: I don’t believe one [expletive] sentence of that. They don’t believe that. They don’t believe in this country. They believe in this country right now because it protects them and provides some benefits to them. Remember, we bailed out these [expletive] on Silicon Valley Bank. Biden bailed them out when they couldn’t make payroll. They could make payroll if they put more of their own money in, but they wouldn’t. They had the little guy bail them out in the Silicon Valley Bank.

Now, in the last couple of days, what are they talking about? Oh, my gosh, we need a Marshall Plan. We need a space plan. We need a Mercury Plan. We need hundreds of billions of dollars from taxpayers. They want essentially a bailout. If it’s a Sputnik moment, somebody’s got to ask the question: Yo, Andreessen! We made a deal with you guys. Elon, we made a deal with you guys. We made you oligarchs. We made you the richest people in the [expletive] history of the Earth. We stopped any antitrust. This is what pisses me off the most. No antitrust, not breaking these companies up and allowing entrepreneurs to get in there. Marc Andreessen doesn’t believe in the entrepreneurial system in the country. No way!"

Og, helt til slutt, settes forholdet hans til Donald Trump ytterligere på spissen av Steve Bannon:

"I think that the globalist elite thought he was dead, and he’s been resurrected. He resurrected himself. And he has a movement that has his back. The fundamental questions about this republic and the sovereignty of it and about the direction of humankind are all going to play out in the next four or five years. It’s going to be the most intense part, I think, of modern political and social history."

Både videoutgaven av intervjuet og en transkribert utgave er her i New York Times. I tillegg er det å finne på flere podcast-kanaler, som Apple og Spotify, og dessuten på YouTube.